Tutorial on ontological engineering: Part 3: Advanced course of ontological engineering

Abstract

This article deals with advanced topics of ontological engineering to convince readers ontology is more than a rule base of terminological problems and is worth to consider a promising methodology in the next generation knowledge processing research. Needless to say, ontology in AI is tightly connected to ontology in philosophy. The first topic here is on philosophical issues which are very important to properly understand what an ontology is. After defining class, instance and is-a relation, we point out some typical inappropriate uses of is-a relation in existing ontologies and analyze the reasons why. Other topics are basic ontological distinction, part-of relation, and so on. As an advanced example of ontology, an ontology of representation is extensively discussed. To conclude this tutorial, a success story of ontological engineering is presented. It is concerned with a new kind of application of ontology, that is, knowledge systematization. An ontology-based framework for functional knowledge sharing has been deployed into a company for two years and has been a great success. Finally, future of ontological engineering is discussed followed by concluding remarks.